Species

Humans

humans
species
earth
solar-system
celtic-union
endoskelia
star-rangers

The record converts every date it holds into a human count, and the conversion is so old a courtesy that the page it is a courtesy to had gone unwritten. This is that page. It is written the way the others are, from the world outward, with the observer named.

Humans are a sapient people native to Earth, in the Solar System. They are filed in the frame Endoskelia: an internal skeleton, two arms, an upright stance. They are the only people on the record who are metazoans, since metazoa are a family and nothing off Earth is in it, and their heredity runs on DNA, which the record holds to be one solution, found once, on one world, out of what that world had to hand. None of these is a rank. Each is a fact about where the body came from, and the record keeps it where it keeps the same fact about everyone else.

The Frame That Is Not the Yardstick

Two peoples on the record are built on the human frame, and the other is the Krenyi, of independent origin, who arrived at the same skeleton and share with humans no ancestor, no biosphere and no molecule. Everyone else is otherwise, and the record's standing refusal is that none of them is described, drawn or imagined as a human with features applied. Humanoid, where a filing uses it, is an off-worlder's yardstick, and the record names whose. The first Federation filing called the Mnemari humanoid because a Mnemari shares a room, an atmosphere and a table with a human without special arrangement, and the word was never a description of the body.

The habit runs the other way as well. A people likened to an Earth animal has been likened by a human eye, and a Chthonari or a Verdani has its own comparisons for a human body, drawn from its own world, which the record files the same way and weighs the same.

Two Worlds Without an Asterisk

A human lives unassisted inside one band of gravity, pressure, air, temperature and light, and that band occurs naturally on two worlds in the catalogue: Earth, and Tír na nÓg, where the first colonists stepped off the ark and breathed before anyone had worked out why. Everywhere else, human settlement is envelope manufacture: a dome, a filtration mask, a tended band, a ring. The world nearest the edge, Drithane, is walkable at the price of weeks of acclimatisation, with its agriculture under glass. No other people surveyed is natively compatible with Earthlike gravity or atmosphere, on their own world or anyone else's, and the symmetry is exact: a human can no more swim Meridian's seas than Meridian's people can walk Tír na nÓg.

So every meeting between a human and another people happens in a room somebody built. The facilities standard the record calls humanoid is the human band under a name that records whom the first filings met, not whose air is the default. Nobody's envelope is the universe's default, and a long posting in human air is a cost a Cerebraun carries and a corridor an Ilveth goes half-blind in.

Born, Grown, Old, and Dead

The shape of a human life is the one the record treats as a local arrangement rather than the rule: born, grown, aged and dead, in that order, from a line winnowed by evolution and carried by sexual reproduction. The record has stopped being surprised at how rarely the arrangement recurs. Long life exists on the record as somebody's biology and never transfers. The Krenyi live for centuries and humans never adopted it; the one mechanism proposed for why is a named researcher's hypothesis, whose own conclusion is that it will not transfer; and cold sleep was tried in the sublight centuries and never once succeeded. What the record holds about a human span in its present is a Corps figure. A Ranger's maximum retirement age is about a hundred and ten, set roughly where the eleventh decade's borrowed capability runs out, and deliberately short of the lifespan ceiling, which the record does not state. Death stays real.

One self per body is not the rule either. The Concord's personhood standards settled at home, before any survey needed it abroad, that a body may carry more people than the form has boxes for, and the record counts the persons.

What They Are Structurally Bad At

Reading a human. A human reads another person's feeling off what a body does with it, the flinch, the held breath, the gesture that leaks, and reads another's fear through their own, so that the instrument is measuring something it is also doing. It is accurate often enough to be relied on and least accurate where accuracy is scarcest. The record issues no human an antenna for it: empathy here is perception coupled with inference, trainable, fallible, and audited by its best practitioners.

The same body that reads by leakage leaks, and keeps two channels that need not agree. To an Ovruhn ear a human is a continuous broadcast under a voice saying something else. To a Krenyi, most human rooms are conducting two or three small social fictions at any moment, and a human diplomat softens a fact into something not quite the case where a Krenyi would soften the delivery and leave the fact. None of this is filed as a flaw. It is one sensorium seen from its two edges, as the Chthonari's is. A people that can hold a feeling apart from its statement is the people that built offices held apart from persons, and words that bind whoever utters them, which the Ovruhn find the hardest thing about humans and the most worth study.

What the Other Peoples Make of Humans

The record keeps each people's account of the others beside its own, attributed and never adopted, and this is where it files the ones about humans.

The Ovruhn name for humans translates without difficulty: the Loud People, a body that never coheres with its voice. Their keepers add that a species which files the unfamiliar by resemblance has told you how it files, the most human sentence in their whole record of us.
An Ilveth surveyor's phrase, offered without malice: lanterns that cannot be put out, a creature spending a bonfire's worth of heat on simply existing, whose blushes the early contact records show Ilveth solemnly answering as statements.
The Cerebraun Hegemony's account, in its diplomatic register, calls humans the descendants of predators whose moderation came late. The Archive files it beside what it leaves out, and notes that the account would read the same whether it were true of humans or of the Cerebraun.
Humans find the Krenyi attractive and unreadable; the Krenyi read a human's fear accurately, form no romantic attachment across that distance, and have never once been recorded finding a human ridiculous for being afraid.
The Ollune are relaxed about what humans say and literal about what humans sign, and have found that human commercial counterparties tend to mean the opposite by both.
The Mnemari describe outliving, in full clarity, everyone who mattered to them on a posting among mortal colleagues, and the institutions that station them have learned to build a departure ritual for the colleagues who will not remember it as clearly.

The record ranks none of these. It keeps the human accounts of the other peoples on the same shelf, including the ones the Academy now teaches against.

Where They Live, and Under Whom

The Solar System, one star under the law of the Concord, is mostly human and outnumbers the Celtic Union of Planets many times over; the Union, a confederation of human worlds settled from six arks that left to keep their languages alive, is the next largest human population on record and far less dense. Beyond the polities, the record holds human settlements that answer to none of them: the Kingdom of the Five Islands, settled by a departure older than any Solar System record; the Tally, who were not a people when they left and became one aboard; Winterbourne and Quern; and New Cotswolds, in another galaxy, the one entry the Archive keeps in the past tense. Whether humans are the greater part of all settled people, taken across the four polities, is not a fact the record holds. The Federation has no office that could count its members, the Hegemony has given no figure, and the Archive does not file a majority it cannot count.

Humanity is not a member of the Federation of Sentient Beings, and characteristically so. The record files the reason as a fact about human character: humanity keeps its own counsel and its own helm, and prefers treaties it can sign to an assembly it would sit in. The Federation, founded on the sentence that no member's internal governance is any other member's business, has never pressed.

What Earth Made Cheap

Capability is a shape, not a height, and the human shape is on the record in what the other peoples found strange about it. Earth had fire early, and humans took the furnace for the spine of a history, which a people of grown materials never did. Humans built external symbol-storage, writing and everything stacked on it, which solved a problem a chorus-keeping people never had. And humans learned to hold an office apart from the person in it.

The same shape has its costs on the record. Humans built war, which the record never assumes of a people: the Coherence Wars ran forty years, 2503 to 2543 UCSD, and ended in the Tycho Accords and the Concord, whose law has outlasted every government that enforced it. Humans crossed to other stars first by generation ark, at the odds of an open boat, and the Solar System filed every departure as lost. They ratified the Kernel Accords in 2694 UCSD, whose first invariant says humans because humans were who the drafters had met, and has never been read that narrowly since. And they chartered the Star Rangers in 2723 UCSD, no branch of which is military, which a people that built war and then declined it could do, and did.

In the Corps

Humans are not privileged in the Corps, and a human Ranger's culture is one case among the cases. The field uniform is a modular shell fitted per body plan, the rank tab is a shape and not a word, and certification is examined on grounds that credit no one's physiology. The three ages that bound a Ranger's service are the human case because the medicine behind them is human, and a Ranger of another people serves to her own people's equivalents, set by the Medical Corps. The Celtic Union supplies the largest share of the Corps' officers from beyond the Concord.

The Words

Human is a lineage word and humanoid a silhouette word, and the record keeps the two apart: a chimpanzee shares humanity's ancestry and a Krenyi shares humanity's silhouette, and neither word implies the other. Simian is the record's stipulated word for Earth's primates that are not human. Alien is for a being unknown to the Star Rangers and nothing else, and xeno- in a discipline's name marks a comparison across peoples, never a class of being. The word for all of them, humans included, is people.

A note on rendering: humans are the one people the record does not translate. Its pages are written in a human tongue, its dates in the Concord's count with the original noted beside the conversion, and its person-forms are the humans' own, he, she and they as each person has them. What the other peoples call humans in their own tongues the record holds only where a people's page has filed it.

What the Record Does Not Carry

Earth's present geography, which the Archive has not been asked to set out and does not set out unasked. The human lifespan ceiling, which the Corps' retirement age is deliberately set short of. The count of humans across the four polities, and whether it is a majority of anyone. And a settled human account of humans, of which the record holds more than one and adopts none.